A simple life in a technical world

Our children and their friends are still talking about the Pirate Plunge Mud Run and how they can make it better next year.

My daughter and I were looking through the photos for the promo shots for next year. I was still reminiscing about the two black bottoms with the tutus upside down hanging over the tire wall.

Then, there were the girls wearing tutus from “Jesus Christ Superstar.” I recognized them immediately. Pirates in tutus seemed to fit the Mud Run. These muddy costumes will never be clean enough for anything again except for next year’s mud run.

My daughter said, “There are a whole lot of pictures of you, Mother, with this guy. What were you doing hugging on that man?”

“Let me see.” I took a look at the pictures, “Oh, he told me he was one of the Ninja Warriors. I was getting into the party atmosphere. I was making him feel welcome and just being friendly.”

“Brian Arnold was the Ninja Warrior. Do you know who this other guy is?”

“He’s a Ninja Warrior from Aztec.”

“Mother, he’s the phone guy. You’ve got to get a hearing aid.”

One week later, my email was down; now I really needed the phone guy. My life revolves around the Internet and the computer.

I called my phone guy, who has always been my go-to guy for my online service. He was in deep mud with the thunder and lightning taking out others’ service, too. It would be a couple of days before he could work on my DSL service. I couldn’t do anything but wait.

He drove through our own version of a mud run to get to our house on the Blanco. He spent three hours trying to resolve my email problem. He finally said, “We’ve got to call the help team at the main office. I think it has to do with Chrome. Chrome and your Mac aren’t compatible.”

“I can relate; at the moment I’m not compatible with either Chrome or Mac or the phone company.”

We called the computer expert from the telephone company and spent another hour. He configured another path to the server, but then he got confused and couldn’t figure it out. He said he needed to start another email account.

“What about all my email addresses? I have business cards, books, media packets, everything with my email address on them.”

“No problem, it’s an internal account, but we’ll have to cancel your other accounts and start all over again.”

“Do you mean I will have another email address? Will my old accounts feed into this new account?”

“I don’t know. You need to pay a service for your computer.”

I said to the tech man, “It’s a new computer, the problem is not on my end. It’s the server and the path. Now, that you’ve worked on it, I can’t even get on my Internet.”

My phone guy said, “It’s too complicated for me. I’ll turn your name in and someone in the office will call you.”

A call the next day from the telephone company assured me they didn’t know anything either, but I could get this company they use, but she wasn’t sure that they worked on Macs. She’d find out and call me next week, since we were going into another weekend.

I’m still without service. I’m running around with a flash stick trying to do business. As I was tagging my final brushstroke at the bottom of the page, another break in the electricity shut down my computer again. I frantically opened the file to see if I remembered to save it. I didn’t. What a muddled mess.

Help. I need the Ninja Warrior telephone man whom I met at the mud run. Someone is in deep mud.

Final brushstroke: Don’t email me at betty@bettyslade.com. You’ll have to keep your comments to yourself unless you have a Facebook account. It’s getting really complicated for this simple life here in Pagosa.

Artist quote

“I am determined to be cheerful and happy in whatever situation I may find myself. For I have learned that the greater part of our misery or unhappiness is determined not by our circumstance but by our disposition.”